


It’s Gilgamesh…!?

by obeyingthemuse



Series: Who's That Servant? [2]
Category: Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Genre: ??? - Freeform, Apparently I can't write crack unless it's, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, Gilgamesh demands the best cooking and the best cooking is Shirou's- obviously, Might turn into an Emiya Gohan, Shirou-centric, Sporadic Updates, Unlike the Emiya one Shirou actually has no idea what's going on in this one, we'll see
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2019-01-21
Packaged: 2019-05-04 04:03:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14584530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/obeyingthemuse/pseuds/obeyingthemuse
Summary: Sometimes, Rin gets the Saber she’s wanted. Sometimes, Shirou summons Gilgamesh.Or,A shiny golden man wards off a blue spandex man armed with a glowing red stick by throwing money at the latter with all the flare and force of miniature falling stars, before turning around and introducing himself to Shirou as his personal ghost. Huahahahaha.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is what happens when you watch Emiya Gohan while fighting writer's block and crying over how sad the actual canon is.

Shirou fell backwards through the doors of the warehouse and weakly spasmed with the aggravation of his chest wound from the physical repercussions of his hasty move. He didn’t notice when his feet tangled, but he was lying on the ground propped up by his elbows before he knew it with a burning in his hand and a flash of red aiming for his heart. Fear burned through his nerves like acid. Death was seeking him for a third time. 

This was what it meant to be Emiya Shirou:

Ten years ago, a fire had burned away his childhood, his family name, his very self. As a veritable newborn, young Shirou had wandered without direction as the fire had filled him with ash and grief instead of a character or a soul; indeed, he would learn that nothing was ever his to keep just as everything was his to take, like a bucket with a hole. Or a grail without a bottom. He had shared the suffering of the dying people around him as his own, craved their salvation as if it was his own, and moved his feet with the same desire to live as that which rose in the choked air as countless cries. He had walked endlessly as if he had known nothing else until the end had finally found him and strangled his throat with glass and dust before his legs had given out and the rain had found his eyes. 

Then a man had found him. With Shirou’s hands in his own, the man had wept, moved by an unseen warmth that wrote life in the man’s eyes unlike the heat of the fire that only burned. Shirou had gazed between the needle-like droplets of rain and the fading of his mind to acknowledge the man’s face and words and identify them as “happiness.” 

Survivor’s guilt would eat him out with the tragedy that the countless cries and hands reaching out even in his sleep would not realise happiness once or ever again. Obligation had clamped down on young Shirou to find happiness where those he had outlived could not, and, led by his first understanding of the foreign idea, Shirou had sought to accomplish what Kiritsugu had: to save someone. Anyone. Even after being guided away from survivor’s guilt, Shirou found that he didn't need a reason to do the right thing. Kiritsugu, Fuji-nee, and others Shirou would meet would mislabel his intentions as a “dream,” and Shirou as a child would allow it, unaware that the proper definition of the resolve that kept a plug to his emptiness and was saving him just as much as Kiritsugu had was not simply a dream but a “purpose.” For Shirou, it was the only one he had. 

And the lancer’s spear was about to steal it from him. 

Unaware of amethyst light drawing patterns and circles around him, Shirou declared from the flame-touched depths of his heart a layered but honest truth. 

“I want to live!”

~

~

The warehouse _exploded._

More accurately, golden light suddenly intercepted the lancer’s spear and rained down on the killer like meteors, hot and heavy, rending the ground it touched mere smoke and nearly filling the air with enough yellow light to call the phenomenon “daytime.” 

Anyone else would have fearfully admired the golden lasers that shot towards the lancer with the mind-melting brightness and heat of what could only be likened with supernaturally righteous judgement, but Shirou watched, wide-eyed, as what his sharp eyes instead perceived was a sword of fine quality from its lovingly-bound leather grip to its oil-quenched blade descend from a ring of rippling light and fly true for the lancer’s head, simultaneously joined by yet another bladed work of art, and another. Shirou almost felt wasteful witnessing these stunning works of smithery follow a straight path instead of swing and clash in the air with skill as they were meant to, but the sight lasted only a second. 

Literally. 

Howsoever the lancer had managed to survive the onslaught, the spearman was gone and the light was not, and Shirou lifted his gaze up to an armoured figure silhouetted by the rings of light behind him almost as golden as he. 

“I ask of you,” the stranger spoke, every syllable as expectant and imposing as the ghost of a smirk on his lips and his piercing crimson gaze, “are you worthy to be my Master?”

Shirou grasped for reason before the reality that a shiny golden man had warded off a blue spandex man armed with a glowing red stick by throwing money at the latter with all the flare and force of miniature falling stars. They also spoke Japanese, but the words they assembled together held no meaning whatsoever, and now one of them was staring at Shirou expectantly as if Shirou could provide a level-headed response that made sense. 

“…Who are you?” Shirou tested. 

The armoured man before him crossed his arms with a more open smirk, apparently pleased somewhat by Shirou’s words. So far, so good. 

“I am Gilgamesh, the King of Heroes, sovereign over Uruk, Knight and Heroic Spirit of the Bow. By your will, I answer your call, but by my will shall I form a contract with you, should I find the benefits that you offer pleasing enough. Tell me thus, lowly magus, the name of he who calls upon the mightiest of Heroic Spirits to attain the Holy Grail and claim victory for him in this war.”

Shirou had understood literally only one phrase among the half dozen that this king had thrown at him. 

“I’m Emiya Shirou,” he replied, and his brows furrowed. “You say…war?”

The king, Gilgamesh, dismissed his rings of light and lowered himself on a crate with crossed knees, somehow transforming the warehouse into a throne room by his air alone. “Merely the foolish squabble between mongrels who would delude themselves into seeking my Grail without my blessing.”

“This Grail is yours?”

“Every treasure of this earth is mine,” Gilgamesh dismissed. “The contents of my vault surpass even my knowledge.”

Shirou wasn't aware of a massive vault having also materialised in the warehouse, nor what Gilgamesh meant by “treasure,” but he at least understood the golden spirit’s words at their base level. The mention of a “contract” also implied a bond to an extent, and though cryptid myths of spirits and possession likely had no place in Shirou’s unusual situation, he predicted a physical range in both his and Gilgamesh’s freedom. 

Opening his mouth, Shirou admitted, “If other spirits like you are fighting each other over your possessions, I'm fine with staying out of their way, but what about you? If you wish to seek them out and neutralise them, I will follow, but if you wish to stay here, I cannot promise that you will be undisturbed if I hear that the other spirits have dragged non-combatants into their skirmishes. I’m not confident with the range of our connection if I decide to cross half the city to intercede for innocents.”

Shirou had apparently guessed correctly, as the king before him exhaled a “hm!” in dismissal. “Your concerns are your own, Shirou. As an Archer-class, I can exist independent of a Master for two days. _However,_ ” Gilgamesh’s tone frosted, “in the event that either of us stray beyond our range, I expect you to reserve yourself as _my_ Master until I return to you and reestablish our contract. Only a king’s justice awaits those who betray him.”

“Makes sense,” Shirou accepted, and stood up from the floor at the same time Gilgamesh arose from his crate. 

The tension in the air that had hung over the both of them shifted with the redirection of Gilgamesh’s gaze, as if reality sat in perpetual expectation for a command from the king. Whether or not the armoured “Archer” had materialised on earth as the hero of the eponymous tale, Shirou accepted that for however long this spirit would haunt him, Gilgamesh deserved the respect that one would give the so-named legend of past. Gilgamesh was apparently also satisfied by Shirou’s attitude, as he awaited with crossed arms for Shirou to precede him out the door as a king would wait for a guard. Shirou found irony in the fact that Gilgamesh could fight for the both of them no sweat. 

“Shirou, you understand who is truly Master and Servant, here. With my approval, our contract is sealed.”

Shirou wondered what would have transpired in the warehouse had the king not contracted with him. 

As they departed from the warehouse for the main house, Shirou glanced back at Gilgamesh who trod behind him as if escorted. “I was about to have dinner. Would you like to join me?” So Shirou offered, yet Gilgamesh’s gaze found Shirou and sharpened with the puzzling return of, “You would place yourself at _my_ table?” 

…Grasping this person’s speech patterns was difficult. Last Shirou checked, he owned the short-legged table that Gilgamesh had yet to see. “Have you ever had hamburger steak?” Shirou advanced blindly. 

The spirit paused. “Is this dish worthy of me?”

~

The king’s eyes closed, and he swallowed. Shirou hesitated. 

“Would you like another patty?”

Gilgamesh’s eyes snapped open. “You would serve me just one? I demand three,” he scolded. 

Unknowingly, Shirou had dodged certain death thrice that day by his remarkable ignorance of magecraft and his remarkable cooking. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gil might or might not end up being a troll once he realises the extent of Shirou's obliviousness.
> 
> Please review!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I found out the trick to writing this fic is to be hungry. Can you tell?

Being haunted by a spirit that subsisted off of hamburger steak and wine and could kill him in one second flat was apparently just the same as living with an eccentric roommate. 

Whether or not spirits required sustenance, Shirou made sure to alert Gilgamesh on when meals were ready with the allowance for the king to decline, but so far the Heroic Spirit had yet to fail showing up to eat. Whenever a maintenance request delayed Shirou’s departure from school for home, he would borrow the school faculty phone – at this point he was a familiar face among the staff – and leave a message on the Emiya residence phone for Gilgamesh to hear on when Shirou expected he’d return. Shirou also made it a habit to keep a supply of rice crackers on the dining table, as Gilgamesh appreciated the texture in his mouth while indulging in his current fancy, from assembling model motorcycle kits to playing video games. 

One could be tempted to compare the king to a NEET. 

Regardless, the company was good, and Fuji-nee easily accepted the Emiya residence’s guest as one of Kiritsugu’s old friends. Fuji-nee didn’t come around often that week, but when she did, her recounting of Shirou’s cooking history to Gilgamesh always seemed to influence the king into demanding a taste of this or that dish. Even now, Shirou was swiftly chopping daikon into thin slices in preparation of a light New Year’s dish for breakfast while Gilgamesh sat at the dining table flipping through channels. At this point, Shirou had warned the king enough that neither of Gilgamesh’s hands were reaching for the bowl of packaged rice crackers at the centre of the table, and while the king himself was free to act as he pleased, he had also wisely decided that eating soon before a meal had the potential of ruining it. 

Shirou’s plan of attack centred around the square mochi of his take on ozoni. After pushing his daikon slices together with his other chopped vegetables with his knife, Shirou’s toaster oven dinged right on time. He laid eight square mochi on its rack, slid the rack in, and set the cook time to five minutes, before checking his pot of dashi on medium temperature. 

The cooking stock was swirling with trapped heat, and, satisfied, Shirou set the pot’s lid aside to add in his daikon, carrot, and kamaboko slices. He stirred the soup at first to mix the vegetables, but after a minute he was confident they’d grow tender without his attention for the next few, and he returned to his chopping board. 

Due to the king’s short notice, Shirou hadn’t had the opportunity to buy mitsuba, so he took out four stalks of green onion instead and quickly chopped them. Wiping his hands with a towel, Shirou advanced to his sauces and seasoning, measuring out a tablespoon of soy sauce, one more of sake, and half a teaspoon of salt. Another stir of the boiling vegetables confirmed they were evenly tender, and Shirou poured in his measurements to season the soup. When the oven dinged, Shirou cracked it open to let the residual heat lightly brown the mochi. He took out two soup bowls from a cabinet, turned off the stove, and stirred clockwise once more with a ladle before pouring the soup into the bowls. With chopsticks, he added the now puffy mochi in the soup and bowls, and sprinkled green onions over everything. 

“King,” Shirou carried the dishes over, “breakfast is ready.”

Gilgamesh lowered the volume of the TV and turned around, his eyes brightening upon sight of the steaming bowls with silent pleasure. “This is the chewy soup?”

Shirou smiled and nodded. “Ozoni.”

He completed their place setting with a small mandarin and cup of green tea for each of them, serving a - mostly - balanced meal. Shirou walked Gilgamesh through peeling the mandarin once as was the fashion of the king to retain information quickly, and the two smoothly tucked in. 

As their utensils hit the sides of their bowls with porcelain pings, the TV blathered on mutedly in the background, covering the week’s murders yet solved by the police. Shirou’s boss for his part-time work had recently told him that she preferred he not show up for work until the neighborhood felt safer. The school had likewise banned after-school activities, though that hadn’t stopped Shirou from tripping into a mages’ war. 

Regardless, this meant that Shirou had more time to catch up on his repair queue. He doubted the war would touch school grounds again after the unsubtle incident with the so-called Lancer. With no one on campus, Shirou could work peacefully. 

“By the way, Archer,” Shirou piped up, “I’m going to rise early and skip breakfast tomorrow for a discount sale at the market. I can prepare food tonight for you to eat the next morning if you’d like.”

Gilgamesh barely glanced up from his soup. He truly was enjoying it. “I care not for agendas, Shirou. Cook breakfast tomorrow. A king only partakes in the best of meals.”

Shirou smiled, honoured for his cooking to be among the “best.” Between the touched chef and the silently happy king, flowers sprouted in the air. 

“Thank you,” Shirou said. 

He could prepare chicken karaage tonight and reheat it the next morning before leaving for the sale. The convenience behind karaage was that it tasted good hot or cold, and when served with spinach sauté and onigiri it gave the impression of a light but complete meal. For a breakfast of leftovers, it could still satisfy the king. With another motorcycle model kit in his hands, Gilgamesh was unlikely to notice the karaage’s chewy instead of crispy skin over its novel flavour, anyway. 

After cleaning up after themselves and throwing on the blazer of his school uniform, Shirou strolled to the front door and slipped into his outdoor shoes.

“Shirou.”

The magus held the front door open and looked back. 

Gilgamesh leaned against the wall at the genkan’s edge, his golden hair catching fire under the sun and his ruby eyes gleaming. “Summon me if you find something interesting.” 

Shirou hesitantly nodded, aware of the king’s relationship with boredom. “How will I call you?”

“Command Seals.” Gilgamesh pointed at the dark circles marking Shirou’s hand as if inked on. “Use them one at a time, and sparingly. Our contract expires after the third command.”

“…So only call you for something _very_ interesting,” Shirou revised, inwardly sighing at the king’s tendency to update Shirou on their contract at his leisure. The mage would have preferred learning all the details of their contract from the beginning, but the king couldn’t be pushed to participate in any action outside his pace. 

With a nod goodbye to his personal ghost and a slide of the door closed, Shirou continued on his path to school. 

~

~

The day was mostly quiet, save for Kaede’s sliding prostration into Shirou’s sight with another maintenance request from the track team that he easily accepted. After classes let out and everyone left the school grounds, Shirou poked his head out the student council's usual meeting room to confirm he was alone. Satisfied, he left his hiding place for the track team’s club room with a tool kit in hand. 

Trailing pigtails drew Shirou’s eye up a staircase. 

“…Tohsaka?”

He recognised the model student, but not the pinched and proud expression on her face as she halted in her steps. What was she still doing in school?

“I wonder,” Rin bit out, facing him, “does naïvety or arrogance drive Emiya Shirou, for him to attend school today?” 

“Sorry?” Shirou choked on the word as his head reflexively flinched aside, his instincts’ concerns quickly explained by the following explosion and Rin’s abruptly raised hand connected by a path through the space where Shirou’s eyes had been. He threw a bewildered and mildly offended gaze at his attacker. “This is a school!” 

“Any vacant space is a battlefield for mages,” Rin brusquely corrected without hesitating to fire after Shirou's nimble but defenceless form with a graceful leap down the stairs for his floor. Shirou’s tools scattered across the ground as the bag slipped from his startled fingers. “Or have you no shame hiding behind a harmless façade!”

Shirou threw open a classroom door and still barely rescued his body from splintering as his temporary shield had, so swift and precise shot Rin with her magecraft. An unearthly scent clotted Shirou’s nose, and he futilely coughed the presence of mana away. 

“I have no idea what——!”

“Fool me twice, shame on me!”

A crimson star twinkled past Shirou’s leg, missing by a hair, before blowing a hole in a desk, and Shirou concluded that trying to hold a conversation with the school idol while this obsessive state held her proved as fruitful as reasoning with a machine gun. The apparent mage fired words at Shirou almost as quickly as her magecraft, and Shirou could only bite his tongue as he wasted several classrooms in defensive stalling against his irate schoolmate while she vented. 

“I hope you found my heirloom’s healing of your wound more amusing than I did, as I had little humour left for the spectacle you made of me and Lancer with your Servant! How hard you must have laughed when the fool who attacked you and the fool who saved you both witnessed your competence as a mage in your home grounds! If you shall survive a next time, _Emiya-kun,_ ” Shirou bodily shivered, “I will command Saber to finish you if Lancer’s spear doesn't!” 

Rin muttered German under her breath and — in a frightening gap image — kicked a door off its hinges with a single thin leg. 

“Consider this a promise from one mage to another!” she declared. 

“You are upset…” Shirou set a desk back down, “…that I didn't share with you that I was a mage?” 

Rin snatched the opportunity to catch her breath and gather herself, although her firing hand remained alert. “As uncommon as ‘sharing’ is among mages, one of my calibre should know regardless.” 

“You criticise yourself too harshly,” Shirou offered. “Even I have to analyse an appliance for holes before I try repairing it. One works with only what is there, after all.” 

“You speak of _air conditioners_ in the midst of a war…” Rin deadpanned, and observed the furniture Shirou had reinforced and she had destroyed. She whipped a piercing blue gaze on Shirou. “You practice a useless craft in a battle?” 

Shirou huffed. “I apologise for having zero talent outside of Reinforcement and Projection.” 

“ _Projection?_ Who taught you if not the Magus Killer Emiya?” 

“The who now?” 

“Emiya-kun…” Rin’s voice softened with the weight of a balanced scale, the sudden tone flip startling Shirou, “are you one for research or for profit?” 

“I…” Shirou furrowed his brows at Rin’s unexpected seriousness. “I just repair devices.” 

“I see.” Rin rose her arm. 

Wrong answer. 

Shirou was a perfect tool. In terms of magecraft, he possessed no ambition or curiosity, and his interaction with others largely circled around his usefulness as a fake janitor. The magecraft he practiced was limited to material objects that served little use in a mage’s search for the Root, and he would have been content ignoring Rin even had he known she was a fellow competitor in the secret war. Rin would have been content ignoring the hopeless Shirou as well, had he expressed even a hint of ambition as a competitor. 

But Shirou’s responses were empty. Command Seals belonged to properly ambitious mages and not casual repairmen. 

The reasons and emotions behind Rin’s barrage against Shirou that followed his disappointing answer were many, and in a parodied miracle, Rin didn’t need words for Shirou to grasp every one of them. Rin’s bloodlust was perfectly passionate. 

Shirou was fortunate that their tussle only moved from the upper floors down to the ground level, as Rin’s Servant was monitoring the school perimeter in spirit form with the knowledge that Rin would observe the grounds from the centre. Saber approached scenarios with a straightforward manner appropriate of her class, and encountering her master attempting to kill another would have prompted the idea of finishing what her master could not, as her knightly and Servant oaths demanded of her. 

The two masters’ one-sided fight tore chaos across classrooms until a sudden, gasping cry flushed them of their adrenaline. There should have been no other mage on campus. 

Rin’s immediate dash for the source betrayed her soft heart towards non-combatants, which Shirou followed to the sight of an innocent student lying frail on the ground and barely breathing. The ground was dirty, but Rin unhesitantly knelt down in her stockings and ironed skirt to prop the student up in her lap. Shirou’s brows furrowed at the limp student’s inexplicable tiredness just when he intercepted an oversized nail for Rin’s face with his arm. Blood sprayed. 

“Ha?” Rin inhaled sharply. 

The chain connected to the nail suddenly tugged Shirou away by the arm for the woods, and the mage pointed at Rin before the thick line of trees swallowed him. 

“Keep an eye on that student!”

Rin pursed her lips in the stark silence that followed, now mostly alone. “That’s a given, idiot.”

~

Shirou had no excuse for how he survived his third encounter with a Servant. 

Maybe Shirou should have checked if his uniform was clean of the food he ate for breakfast before leaving home. Maybe the masked woman with a penchant for murder by chains was just starving for baked mochi.

Either way, when the inhumanly strong and flexible woman punctuated her threats with leaning in – to lick Shirou? Compliment his choice cologne of fear and adrenaline? One sniff and then another deeper one confirmed for her that Shirou smelled like food that would taste better than him. 

“You’re, uh….” She leaned back while still holding up Shirou by his nailed hand. The woman looked as confused as Shirou felt. “You cook.”

Stimulating subject of choice, their current positions considered. Anything was better than the topic of Shirou’s death. He wondered how long Rin actually needed for him to delay this masked servant. 

“I know a few recipes,” Shirou admitted. “I cooked ozoni this morning, but since it was for breakfast I used lighter broth and paired it with citrus fruit on the side. The trick is to boil it just on the side of too hot to fool the tongue into not noticing the savouriness. That way the meal isn’t rich but still filling.”

“How did you bake the mochi? My Master can’t seem to get it right.”

“It depends on the brand you’re using. Sometimes the package’s cooking instructions are suited for the typical toaster oven.” 

They stared at each other. 

“Why would your Master be baking mochi this far from New Year’s?” Shirou cocked his head. 

“Practice,” the woman easily returned, then admitted, “I think.” 

“If I help with the cooking, will you not kill me?” Shirou bargained. 

The nail slid free from his hand, and he fell with a wince. 

“See you this weekend?”

“I’ll come as I please.”

Shirou returned to Rin bloody, bruised, and reciting various mochi recipes in his head. The unconscious student was mostly stable, and when Shirou attempted to help by checking the student’s pulse, Rin cast him a look. 

“You don’t know how to heal, either, I suppose.”

“I never figured it out,” Shirou admitted. 

Incompetent. 

The thought was clearly reflected in Rin’s frown. “You largely taught yourself.”

“My dad preferred I not learn magecraft at all,” Shirou confessed, “but my stubbornness as a child persuaded at least Projection out of him. Reinforcement proved the only other practice I was capable of, after several trials. Even then, I have more difficulty duplicating a length of rope than a kitchen knife, where the former offers more useful possibilities. Your opinion of me has shifted.” He watched Rin’s face. “I thought I would have had to bore you with my incompetence for longer.”

“A mild-mannered man raised you,” Rin accepted. “That, I now grasp. The difference in our knowledge lies not only in magecraft, Emiya-kun. Before this war, I understood that my father had died in the previous Grail War where a Magus Killer Emiya had walked away alive, and after last night, I learned that my schoolmate with the Magus Killer’s surname had spied on Saber’s fight against Lancer and had driven Lancer away from his home with his own Servant.”

“Surveillance and territorial defense,” Shirou acknowledged, “although amateur at best. I cannot blame you for drawing this conclusion based on the circumstantial information you had.” 

“Of course.” Rin smiled. “Now I know you're just helplessly incompetent.” 

Ah, she said it aloud. 

“The difference between acting as I do now and having you as an ally will barely be noticeable.”

Shirou whipped his attention back in the moment. “Huh?” he reacted intelligently. 

Rin tossed a side-tail over her shoulder. “You saved my life, so I owe you this at the least. We should also show each other our Servants.”

“Another time,” Shirou quickly cut in. The last time Gilgamesh had encountered another spirit, it had been with righteous fury, or at least bloodlust. As it was, Shirou had barely survived Rin without actively threatening her. 

Said mage lifted a brow at Shirou’s statement, and not request. Though he had saved her life, he could sense that she disliked receiving revisions on an offer she was extending herself. As the superior mage, she should have been in the position of issuing commands and not the other way around. 

“Can you confirm he’s alone, Saber?” 

Shirou’s blood ran cold with the realisation that Rin wasn’t without her Servant. 

An armoured, petite woman of unexpected regality and beauty materialised behind Rin with a deep green gaze pinned on Shirou. Though the spirit’s expression laid flat and cold, her inquisitive eyes betrayed a sentiment absent of homicide, yet further unreadable. 

Without tearing her gaze from Shirou, the woman answered, “This master is without his Servant.” 

“Careless, are we?” Rin clicked her tongue at Shirou. “As your ally, I tell you now that you should never stray far from your Servant.”

Gilgamesh had declared much the same along with a threat. Shirou was confident the king and Rin would get along well. The thought occupied a minor portion of his mind, however, as the noble woman behind Rin captured Shirou with her detectable presence. He sensed a pull to her that could only be credited to the non-physical. Magecraft? Or perhaps….

Dad had a lot to answer for, when Shirou reunited with his old man. 

He wouldn’t understand until later that Kiritsugu had bequeathed him with Avalon, a possession only possible by having been Saber’s Master in the precious war. For now, he understood that Kiritsugu’s lessons had neglected a vast number of other studies, for Shirou to learn of healing just today and to detect a connection to a spirit without being able to identify or explain it. The way Rin behaved, she could likely do both and more without mental effort. 

“Emiya-kun?”

He had been staring. 

“I have much to learn,” Shirou replied, and rose. “Shall I help you move our schoolmate to a bench?”

~

~

That night, Shirou’s dreams were absent of fire and an old man’s tears. 

Instead, they shone with striking, bright sandstone architectures across a bustling savannah, where people were as ants from a high-enough view. Linen curtains rippled with open air into a dais where a simple golden throne sat upon, surrounded by rugs, plants, and ornate things. A single gaze into the room revealed as many colours as there were stars in the sky, each differing by hues and textures that together laid a feast for the eyes. One’s soul would have been tempted to float away in ecstasy. 

From the tapestry of visual delights emerged a more subdued-dressed woman with warm eyes and the ghost of a smile behind the sheen of her veil. She held a stone tablet in one arm and stood with a competent steward’s spine. The loose cloth that hung back over her hair and across the lower half of her mouth appeared as thin as spider silk yet as soft as tiger’s fur. 

“King,” she called out, her voice smooth and clear like warm water. 

Her veil bunched with the wind in brief imitations of mist, and then firm clouds, like baked mochi——

Siduri——

“Shirou.”

The mage woke up to find himself drooling in his warehouse. Gilgamesh stood over him. 

“I’m hungry,” the king declared. 

Shirou sat up and flicked his eyes at an analog clock. Midnight. A noodle broth dish would be appropriate. Clear savoury broth and floating green onions would soundly finish the day the way it started. 

Shirou rose and dusted himself, a small smile finding his face. “How do you feel about sukiyaki ramen?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologise ahead of time if I get magecraft or grail war mechanics wrong in this fic. Since this is basically Emiya Gohan but where everyone besides Shirou and Gil are more active as participants, I'm not too concerned with being canon-compliant. That said, please enjoy and review!
> 
> Edit: I GOT SIDURI'S NAME WRONG I'M SO SORRY fixed it


End file.
